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Month: March 2010

What is it about some internet communities that band together to do something? Is it perhaps for the lulz? In this case, it reminds me of some group projects I had to work with these other guys in junior high. If we had some project to do, it would turn into a large production. It was often imagination running wild, mostly for the laughs of the idea, since we couldn’t actually do them.

But here, I guess is not only imagination rampant, but people can do something about it. So as a form of oneupsmanship, they start putting up screenshots, mockups, which stirs the imagination of others to join in on the oneupsmanship.

Last week, I went to some meetup, and I met someone that was looking to make a game out of doing things in real life. It’s not really a new concept, but I don’t think people really understood it until recently with foursquare and gowalla.

Mobtropolis was suppose to be something that improved your life experiences as you got better at the game. But My execution sucked, and I didn’t know where to find users. But like someone said to me, just because you wandered around in the desert doesn’t mean you found the treasure. Lots of other people wandered there, you just don’t know about it–I mean, how many people knew about Mobtropolis?

Anyway, it was good to hear about people interested in gaming mechanics in applications. I don’t think there are hardly any games that were hard to figure out how to use it. It may be that games copy each other a lot, or because it’s because I was persistent as a teen gamer.

If you’re interested in game mechanics in applications, here’s a round up. We can start with Amy Jo Kim with “Putting the fun in functional”

here are her slides:

However, just because you put points on something isn’t quite enough to motivate people to do things in real life. Here’s another oldie, but goodie about the Theory of Fun (here’s the book).

You can also use games as a way of motivating people to do grunt work. Here’s the ESP game. He basically concocted a game for people to play that generates test data for machine learning algorithms to learn image recognition. Here’s the fascinating talk about it by the professor that invented it, Luis von Ahn.

When we first got TV cameras, we just video broadcasted radio shows–which became late night talk shows. Eventually, we figured out that you can shoot shows with different formats, from sitcoms to reality TV.

It seems like we’re exploring different formats of internet video, chatroulette being one of them. Sure, you can chat with people, with chatroulette, but if you can come up with something interesting that interacts with the person on the other end, you essentially have a never-ending stream of people as an audience on chat roulette.

In addition, when you record your performances to one person over the chat, you can broadcast it on justin.tv or youtube. Plenty of enjoyment to be had from watching these records, as shown by the video above, as well as the original people in the video getting their 15 mins of fame.

Well, that’s no good. The web was not exactly much help here, but I managed to find this in the postgresql docs:

the USING expression is not applied to the column’s default value (if any); the result might not be a constant expression as required for a default. This means that when there is no implicit or assignment cast from old to new type, ALTER TYPE might fail to convert the default even though a USING clause is supplied.